At the intersection of all the annoying things a rock star can be—messianic, pretentious, vapid, dumb, old, creatively bankrupt, grandiose, utterly bereft of self-awareness, calcified into a grotesque oily wire-rack-in-the-grocery-store knockoff of himself, part of U2, et cetera—there sits Bono in his stupid housefly…

I don't want to live in a world where U2 are well and truly irrelevant, and yet I fear I've been living in that world for quite some time. Or at least working there; what we learned yesterday, when Bono and the boys gave away their new album, Songs of Innocence, for free via iTunes to a half-billion people, is that…